A lot of you seem to be artists I was wondering if you have ever found any good books or resources to help sell paintings for a living. There seem to be a fair few self help books knocking about but they all seem pretty suspect to me. So I was wondering if you have any advice or if you could point me in the right direction.

I've been thinking a lot about that one. I basically have about 12 months to start making a serious income or I'm going to have to give up my studio and practice and go get a job.

I've got a lot of different strategies, not sure if any of them will work or not, but I figure it's best to keep my bets hedged. I'll see if I can formulate them into a brisk paragraph. Probably be good discipline anyway, clarity of goals and all that.

-the books I've relied on when selling and trying to get sold are the Graphic Artist's Guild Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, as well as the book How to survive & prosper as an artist without selling your soul. Also: Contracts. Do not work for anyone without a contract.

Also: Contracts. Do not work for anyone without a contract. (It bears repeating.)

Good, sound boilerplate contracts aren't too hard to find on the internet. But even if you don't want to do that, at least sit down and write out what you and they agreed to: "I will produce a work of art within this timeframe to these specifications. They will pay $X for it (Y% in advance, the rest on completion). [They/I] (pick one) will own the work, but [I/they] will have the right to do A and B with it." Then both sign it. That will avoid a whole lot of disputes based on misunderstandings, and if a dispute happens anyway: yes, a simple contract like this is enforceable in court.

Not totally on point because he lost his sight as an adult but James Holman may be relevant here.

Jason Roberts' book about Holman "A Sense of the World" is great because not only is it a biography of an extraordinary individual it covers the contemperary debate about whether Holman had really experienced Fernando Po; South Africa; Siberia etc if he hadn't seen those places and Holman's responses to his critics.